Melissa Gronlund writes:

At Bagerhat in southern Bangladesh, a city of 360 mosques from the 15th century, salt water from the encroaching Indian Ocean is damaging the foundations. In Yemen, torrential rains are decimating the improbable mud-brick high-rises of Shibam’s 16th-century architecture, newly exposed owing to strikes from the conflict there. In Iraq, the country’s southern marshes are drying up, causing the Indigenous Bedouins to flee for cities, leading to drastic loss of intangible heritage.

The effects of climate change on cultural heritage vary extensively but are inevitably complex. It acts like a cancer from within, whose steady growth is as difficult to track as it is to solve.

“The effects of climate change cannot be seen from one day to the next,” says Ajmal Maiwandi, director of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Afghanistan. “The physical damage to monuments caused by war and natural disaster can often be reversible. However, the gradual changes caused by alteration in the climate often remain unnoticed until it is too late to take action.”

And they are often multiple, with complications that compound one another.

Bagerhat, a UNESCO World Heritage-listed city, has become one of the most famous cases of climate-change-induced peril. Its mosques bear the distinctive domed architecture of the Indo-Islamic style, better known in its later, grander exemplars such as the Taj Mahal. Many of them are still used by members of the public — with the call to prayer given not via recorded messages but by muezzins who climb up the mosques’ squat, red-brick minarets. During cyclones, residents often shelter in the structures, whose solidity provides better protection than their homes. [Continue reading…]